I was recently hired by a company to work on content marketing. I noticed something interesting in the admin area of their wordpress website: a few pages named "links," "links2," etc. They obviously weren't linked to from the homepage, but you could type their URLs in directly. In fact, they went so far as to install the "Exclude Pages" plugin, presumably to keep them from showing on the menus.

Anyway, each of these pages had about 50 links, each with an obviously over-SEOed paragraph beneath it. These are links to the most random things, from sprinkler repair to law firms to Gucci outlets. (Actually, some of the Gucci outlets now redirect to a legal notice page about a lawsuit!) We sell disaster relief products, so to say that these links are unrelated is an understatement.

Many of the websites linked to also have their own pages of random links (one had over 300 pages!), not always as hidden as the pages on our site.

Further, this firm's SEO reports to us are the most elementary Google Analytic screenshots, and their explanation of their screenshots are simply elementary explanations about things like what a "unique visitor" is. Useless!

I know this SEO firm is useless at best, destructive at worst, but I'm curious: what are they doing? Is this common practice? Isn't this sort of thing deprecated by the latest Google updates? Is there a company or some kind of sharing service facilitating this link sharing?

My experience with other SEO firms has been "Content content CONTENT. Write your own, or we'll write it for you, but, CONTENT!"